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Dying away — getting softer and often slower, fading to nothing.
Printed below or between the staves near the end of a phrase or piece, often combined — dim. morendo, poco a poco morendo, morendo al fine, rit. morendo — and in French scores with jusqu’à la fin. It usually lasts to the end of the passage, affecting loudness and, by most readings, tempo; a new dynamic or a tempo cancels it.
Morendo implies the music is expiring. Use it for passages that should genuinely feel like life draining away — not just soft, but approaching silence and stillness. It carries more emotional weight than a simple diminuendo.
Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”), first movement, trombones, tuba and timpani, m. 351: “morendo” in the closing bars, after pp in the bar before.
Morendo is one of 1760 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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